Embroidery is a commonly used technique for providing an infinite variety of singly or multiply colored stitched pattern and pictorial enhancements to wearing apparel and other articles constructed of textiles and other lightweight materials. Embroidery involves the stitching of thread into a selected cloth substrate such as a coat, sweatshirt, sheet material, or the like. By appropriately choosing various threads having different colors and by carefully intermingling such stitched threads, patterns can be created which are extremely attractive, expensive in appearance and suitable for fashionable designer apparel.
With the development of readily available and sophisticated computing hardware and software for controlling embroidery equipment and machinery, the manufacture and production of such enhanced products has been automated whereby such articles are now mass-produced at costs substantially reduced from those of articles previously produced without the benefit of such automation.
Even so, the increased capability has encouraged the production of patterns comprising extremely complex details such that the number of stitches in an embroidered pattern for a shirt or blouse may easily exceed sixty-thousand. With fully automated equipment, approximately forty-five minutes are presently required to install ten thousand stitches by a single stitcher. As a result, each such complex pattern would require the equivalent of several hours production time of a relatively expensive, specialized machine. Therefore, the selling price of such stitched articles must be substantially increased in order to recapture the associated capital investment.
Another commonly used technique for embellishing wearing apparel and other textile products is screen printing with inks compatible with textiles and their uses. Screen printing has been particularly well-adapted to the wide-spread tee shirt and sweatshirt industry due to its versatility, low initial investment, and cost-effectiveness. However, that cost-effectiveness produces diminishing returns as a greater number of individual colors are used to produce increasingly complex, multi-colored patterns due to the fact that an additional production step generally must be added for each additional color.
What is needed is an apparatus and a method which cooperatively utilize screen printing techniques for large uniformly colored areas of a pattern such that substantial production and equipment time and cost savings can be realized for those portions of a particular pattern, and which utilize embroidering techniques for those portions of the pattern which are more delicately and intricately defined, thereby preserving the luxuriousness that only embroidery stitching can provide.